Christie on Trump's claims about New Jersey after 9/11: 'I don't recall'

Chris Christie does not remember the 9/11 attacks the way Donald Trump remembers them.

At a rally in Birmingham, Alabama, on Saturday, the Manhattan business mogul recounted how he saw “thousands of thousands of people ... cheering” as the World Trade Center collapsed on 9/11.

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"I don't recall that. I don't," the governor of New Jersey and Trump’s fellow GOP presidential candidate told reporters in Manchester, New Hampshire, on Sunday, according to a report from NJ Advance Media.

Christie's wife, Mary Pat, worked in lower Manhattan at the time.

"It was a pretty emotional time for me because, as I've mentioned before, there's family involved, there were, you know, friends involved and so it was a pretty harrowing time," he said, according to the report. "I do not remember that, and so it's not something that was part of my recollection. I think if it had happened, I would remember it, but, you know, there could be things I forget, too."

Trump doubled down in a Sunday interview with ABC‘s “This Week with George Stephanopoulos.”

“I know it might be not politically correct for you to talk about it, but there were people cheering as that building came down — as those buildings came down,” Trump told Stephanopoulos. “And that tells you something. It was well covered at the time, George. Now, I know they don’t like to talk about it, but it was well covered at the time. There were people over in New Jersey that were watching it, a heavy Arab population, that were cheering as the buildings came down. Not good.”

“It was on television. I saw it,” Trump claimed. Asked whether he saw it with his own eyes, he reiterated that it did indeed happen.

Stephanopoulos noted twice during their interview that police have said that it did not happen, and The Washington Post, in its Sunday evening fact check, noted a Sept. 18, 2001, article in the Star-Ledger that called “rumors of rooftop celebrations of the attack by Muslims here proved unfounded.”

In response to the paper’s initial article, the Post’s Glenn Kessler noted that several people had tweeted to him a Post article from the same day, which reported that “within hours of two jetliners' plowing into the World Trade Center, law enforcement authorities detained and questioned a number of people who were allegedly seen celebrating the attacks and holding tailgate-style parties on rooftops while they watched the devastation on the other side of the river.”

The Post's report did not give an exact count on the number of people allegedly seen celebrating the collapse, though no known video footage exists, and Trump claimed he saw it on television. News channels did play footage of Palestinians celebrating in the West Bank on the day of and for several days after the attacks that killed nearly 3,000 people in New York, Virginia and Pennsylvania.

The current mayor of Jersey City took on Trump's claim on Sunday as well.

Either @realDonaldTrump has memory issues or willfully distorts the truth, either of which should be concerning for the Republican Party